This article reports on the second language (L2) perception of contrasts among British English monophthongs. This study has two aims: 1) to explore the discriminability of contrasts in L2 British English monophthongs; and 2) to test the perceptual assimilation model-L2 (PAM-L2) towards the ability to discriminate British English contrasts. The…

Traditionally, second language (L2) instruction has emphasised auditory-based instruction methods. However, this approach is restrictive in the sense that speech perception by humans is not just an auditory phenomenon but a multimodal one, and specifically, a visual one as well. In the past decade, experimental studies have shown that the…

We examined whether akshara knowledge, phonological awareness, phonological memory, and RAN predict variability in word and nonword reading skills in Grade 1-4 children (N = 200) learning to read Sinhala. Hierarchical regression analyses showed that akshara knowledge had the strongest unique association with both word and nonword reading accuracy…

Native language acquisition is one of the initial processes undertaken by the human brain in the infant stage of life. The linguist community has always been interested in finding the method, which is adopted by the human brain to acquire the native language. Word segmentation in one of the most important tasks in acquiring the language.…

Early writing--a valuable early literacy skill--begins to develop prior to kindergarten. Young children participating in preschool benefit from writing opportunities facilitated by teachers. Writing opportunities, however, are often limited in preschool settings. It is important to understand teachers' beliefs and practices for promoting early…

English as an International Language (EIL) is grounded in the concept of multiplicity. Such proliferation of non-native varieties of English leads to several controversies including the intelligibility of its speakers to listeners from various language backgrounds. Although this concern has been continuously addressed in EIL research, the focus…

Cross-situational word learning (XSWL) tasks present multiple words and candidate referents within a learning trial such that word-referent pairings can be inferred only across trials. Adults encode fine phonological detail when two words and candidate referents are presented in each learning trial (2 × 2 scenario; Escudero, Mulak, & Vlach,…

In dialogue, speakers tend to adapt their speech to the speech of their interlocutor. Adapting speech production to preceding speech input may be particularly relevant for second language (L2) speakers interacting with native (L1) speakers, as adaptation may facilitate L2 learning. Here we asked whether Dutch-English bilinguals adapt pronunciation…

The present study addresses the scope of the writing difficulties observed in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and mild cognitive impairment (MCI). Patients with AD, patients with MCI and healthy controls performed a written picture-naming task and a direct copy transcoding task in which phonology-to-orthography (P-O) consistency was…

Reading fluency has been acknowledged as a key component in the process of learning to read. As students enter kindergarten, many of them do not have the early or emergent literacy skills they need in order to become fluent readers. Kindergarten students in a Midwest suburban elementary school were studied focusing on their development of reading…

The schwa sound, as the most frequent in English, is a near constant in words of three syllables or longer in academic texts. As linguistic research has shown, it characteristically recurs in rhythmic alternation with stressed syllables, contributing to a word's distinctive sound shape. The location of strong stress and therefore schwa is often…

Prior work demonstrated that toddlers can learn words from a speaker with a foreign accent and generalize that learning to the native accent when the accented variation does not cross phoneme boundaries. The current study explores the situation in which a vowel in the foreign accent is produced such that it could be confused with a different…

Purpose: The purpose of the current study was to determine the effect of neighborhood density and syntactic class on word recognition in children with specific language impairment (SLI) and typical development (TD). Method: Fifteen children with SLI ("M" age = 6;5 [years;months]) and 15 with TD ("M" age = 6;4) completed a…

The Letter-Sound Short Forms (LSSFs) were designed to meet criteria for effective progress monitoring tools by exhibiting strong psychometrics, offering multiple equivalent forms, and being brief and easy to administer and score. The present study expands available psychometric information for the LSSFs by providing an initial examination of their…

This study compared the temporal measurements of stop consonants in 29 three- to six-year-old Mandarin-speaking children and 12 Mandarin-speaking adults. Each participant produced 18 Mandarin disyllabic words which contained six stop consonants /p, p?, t, t?, k, k?/ each followed by three vowels /a, i, u/ at the word-initial position in the first…